Home Ground is a TV show about equality and women’s rights

Home Ground season 1 is a ten-part 50 minutes show, produced by Motlys and NRK and broadcast on NRK in Norway. It’s a story about a female soccer coach, Helena, who gets to train a men’s team in the premiere division. It’s first and foremost a character-driven story about equality and women’s rights told with humor and humanity.

Being a Line Producer on Home Ground

“I think the most interesting part of my position is the emotional aspect of it. It’s about building that trust that we need to keep this thing going between all these people.”

What’s specific about this show for me is that I’m a lot more involved than I usually would be. I was involved at the beginning of season 1 and we’re now filming our season 2. I’m part of the choices that the director makes and I’m pretty much a bridge between the showrunner, the producers and the director.

I also stay with the show all the way through to the finish line, which is something that I started doing lately because I enjoy it more. I think it’s more interesting to be part of the entire process, especially for big shows, we have so much knowledge about what happens on set during production, that it’s valuable info for the post-production phase.

Our challenge: finding a quick and efficient approval process for the location and casting departments

As Home Ground is a TV show and one of the challenges of production is simply getting the crazy schedule to work. We are shooting consecutively, and everything needs to move fast as we don’t have much time to prep each individual episode. Before using SetKeeper, we used to share casting videos and locations pictures with Dropbox or by email, but that wasn’t very efficient, and I never liked it.

“With emails it was impossible to get an overview of how many locations we did set up. Every time we wanted to check something we had to go back and forth and look at everyone’s Excel sheet to see if the location has been approved or not.”

SetKeeper has proven to be a great approval tool

We decided to use SetKeeper because it’s a great approval tool. With SetKeeper it has become so easy to upload casting videos or location pictures. We can then comment and approve them one by one on the platform. Instead of having to make a stamp with the director name saying “director approval” for each confirmed location, the director now just has to click on “confirmed” and the team is instantly aware of it. With this feature, the director or the DOP can also easily upload an example of what they don’t want to see.

“The approval process with SetKeeper is what makes the difference for me, that feature is super helpful.”

Then, as we shoot in different parts of the country, SetKeeper has also become an easy way to communicate even if the team is in different locations.

SetKeeper gives us an overview of our production process

Another big advantage of using SetKeeper for the location and castings is that it helps me to have an overview of the production process. I can quickly see how many locations or cast members have been approved and how many we still need to find. I think this is even more useful and needed in a TV show where we shoot continuously. Indeed, when we start we don’t have all the locations set and it’s really nice to have this central hub where you can see, as it happens, the cast and locations being greenlit and approved by the director.

“It’s very easy for me to see what’s been approved. I use it for keeping track of the process in those two departments - Sets & Locations and Casting - which are usually quite chaotic.”